• Warren Buffett Amasses a $10.7 Billion Stake in Big Blue

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you didn’t think that IBM was really a financial services company as much as an IT provider, now that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company has purchased a whopping $10.7 billion stake in the company, you might just change your mind. During a wide-ranging interview on CNBC on November 14 after The Four Hundred went on Thanksgiving hiatus, Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, said he had been accumulating shares in IBM since March and kept right on buying into the fourth quarter. He has stopped buying shares, which is why the Oracle of Omaha is

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• Where Are Those eXFlash SSDs For Power Systems-IBM i?

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You only see what you are looking at, and like the rest of you in IBM i Land, I have paid close attention to the flash-based solid state drives in 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors that Big Blue has offered specifically for the Power Systems lineup. But IBM’s System x and BladeCenter blade servers have even smaller and less costly SSDs that, at least according to the IBM literature, are perfectly fine for I/O intensive database workloads and that are not available on the Power Systems machines. A recent deal for System x customers brought these smaller SATA drives to

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• As I See It: Privacy Pirates

  November 28, 2011 Victor Rozek

  November is when my property taxes are due. And living in a state without sales tax, they tend to be high. But the amount is not what rankles me. It’s the fact that in a nation built on the sanctity of property rights, I will never truly own my home, even after the final mortgage payment is made. The reality is that as soon as I’m unable to pay my taxes, the state is empowered to take it away from me. Although property rights are at best tenuous, they are so deeply embedded in our mythology that it seems heretical

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• Business Strategy Bumps Into Database Deficiency

  November 28, 2011 Dan Burger

  Most IBM i-based companies do not have a well documented database. It’s likely to go unnoticed until new business requirements uncover the rat’s nest as plans to extract more information from data through business intelligence or advanced queries run smack into database policies that are haphazard or relics of the past. The IBM i operating system includes a modern database management system, but it is limited by data that is poorly defined. To one degree or another, everyone is having this problem. The solution lies between two extremes. On one end is not understanding how to solve the problem and

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• More On That Dreamy And Flashy Power 720 P05 Machine

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Once again, many thanks to the intrepid and helpful reader of The Four Hundred who gave us some insight into the equipment purchasing alternatives facing anyone who buys Power 720-class servers from IBM and the forward-looking direction the company cutting the check for the new system took. (Notice the lack of his or her in that sentence? I had to bend it pretty far to do that.) To make the situation a little clearer, that helpful reader gave us some more insight. To recap: The Dreamy and Flashy Power 720 P05 Machine is one with no disks and no expansion

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• Feeling Like A Heel

  November 28, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Correlation is not causation. That’s one of the first things you learn as an engineer or scientist. But as human beings that are genetically predisposed to find connections between disparate phenomenon, we just can’t help ourselves. We are, in the final analysis, pattern recognition machines that are wired for small tribes and that have a tendency toward gluttony with fatty, sweet, or salty foods. (Which is why Chubby Hubby ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s should be outlawed, right after I finish this here pint.) We may be designed to live in small tribes and do hunting and gathering, knowing

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• Putting Your i System in Semi-Restricted State

  November 16, 2011 Hey, Joe

  We need to put one of our i partitions in restricted state where no applications are running. However, we also need TCP/IP to be up while the system is down, so that we can download PTFs and some software upgrades while our third-party packages aren’t in use. Is there a way to put our system in a semi-restricted state where we can only use our system console and TCP/IP communications? –Mike Yes, there is. And it’s relatively easy to accomplish. Here’s the drill. First, make sure all your users are off the system. Then, make sure that all your batch

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• Wow! I Could Have Had Long Column Names!

  November 16, 2011 Ted Holt

  Sometimes I find out that something useful has been available to me for a long time, but I didn’t know about it. Then I feel like a moron. Today I’m telling you that a certain DB2 for i feature has been around for decades, and you’re probably not using it. However, there’s no need to feel like a moron. The feature of which I speak is the database ALIAS. As you well know, DB2 for i, in its native architecture, permits database column (field) names of up to 10 characters. That’s certainly better than the six-character limit for identifiers in

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• NULL and NOT IN

  November 16, 2011 Ted Holt

  No matter who you are, there’s always something you can learn. In Much Ado about Nothing: Interesting Facts about Null, I presented a good bit of information about null values in database tables. Imagine my surprise and delight to stumble upon something I did not know about nulls. It started innocently enough. I was surfing the Web and happened upon a link to an article entitled Ten Common SQL Programming Mistakes. I couldn’t click the link fast enough. I found a very well-written article by Plamen Ratchev. I won’t repeat the whole thing here, but Ratchev wrote about

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• Linoma: DMZ Gateway Tightens File Transfer Security

  November 15, 2011 Dan Burger

  File sharing among business partners is a common practice. Unfortunately, being careless about it is also a common practice. Security is often imagined to be better than it really is and sometimes not thought of at all. Even companies that are paying attention to this topic–perhaps because it is mandated by one of the regulatory compliance laws–may not have discovered the best practices for secure transfers. Linoma Software recently released a white paper report on the topic of DMZ gateways that provides solid advice on file transfer security. The DMZ (demilitarized zone), also known as a perimeter network, is found

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